CHAPTER 8

Somewhere in the sub-basement of Hadley's Hope colony complex, LV-426.

The little creature fell on a water filled area; it swam using its tail to a low platform where it jumped out the pool, Safe at last. It had fled, it was its first conscious action, an instinct driven impulse because it was still small, and unprotected. All that will change once the creature growth, its skin would harden to an almost impenetrable armor. But until then, it needs to hide… and feed.

Feeding was not a response to hunger; the creature didn't need to metabolize food for energy, which was achieved in a much more efficient way. No, the food would provide biomass to grow, and its species grew a lot ... and very fast.

As the rest of its species, the creature didn't have eyes; they relied on a completely different set of sensorial organs. Smell was important; with a vomero-nasal organ formed by tiny lids over the mouth, the creatures detected even traces amounts of aromas, mainly pheromones, used both to recognize prey and their moods and to communicate with other members of their species. Its elongated head had a hollow cavity used as a resonance chamber which amplified sounds its brain translated into tri-dimensional spatial data, showing the creature direction and distance a noise came from. And last, a series of low-resistivity gel-filled pores on its head acted as the Lorenzini ampules of a shark, detecting electromagnetic fields from any machinery or even biological activity.

Soon, the creature's brain made a mental map of its surroundings; the area was small but not confined as several tunnels and some pipes connected to the outside. It was wet and had traces of gases similar to the chamber where the creature's egg was incubated but it was cold, the creature needed a warm place to grow.

A screeching sound filled the creature's resonance chamber; something was crawling on a pipe above. It crept up using pipes as support and reached the pipe behind the source of the noise, it was a little animal, smaller than itself: a Rat.

The rat stopped, sensing something wrong; it turned around and saw the strange crawling creature behind it and smell it, it was odd, something the rat haven't smelled before and it was unpleasant.

The creature hissed and lounged at the rat, distressed, the rodent screeched and fled top speed over the pipe. The creature gave chase; the darkness wasn't an obstacle as it can follow the rat's scent and steps. The rat crawled through a broken grate into a large pipe, part of the drainage system till it felt safe, then turned in a junction towards its colony.

The creature followed the trail and reached the rat's nest. The first male rat which attacked it was sprayed in acid from the bite wound; the rest of the rats hesitated frightened by the trespasser. The creature set out to do what its millennial instinct insistently ordered. In about five minutes it had achieved what Mary Coles had not been able to: Exterminate the entire rats' population in Hadley's Hope sub-basement. With enough bio-matter available, the creature cocooned itself and growth.

- o –

June 24th, 2179. Hadley's Hope Operations center, LV-426. Few hours before Dawn

-"This is the only place where that thing may be hiding" Al Simpson said, pointing in the blue screen where the colony's blueprints displayed.

-"Near the water treatment plant?" Marshal Wilson asked.

After the creature had escaped through the colony's drainage system, they had gone to Operations to consult the plans of the complex to try to predict where the creature would hide and where it could go.

-"Assuming it hasn't fled" Mary interrupted them; her face was still pale from the impression.

-"No, the area is closed; there are no scheduled maintenance there so it's isolated." Simpson stated. "Meanwhile, we have to keep the matter quiet, I don't want to cause unnecessary panic. Are you sure you and your staff can deal with the problem, Marshal?"

-"It's a bug hunt, Simpson. I'm a little rusty but I'm sure I can deal with that little son of a bitch. I owe it to the Jordens" Wilson said, he was still angry by the creature's escape and the fact he couldn't kill it. "Mary, I need one or two of those motion trackers of you"

-"Yes, Wilson, over here" Mary said, walking towards the exit. Wilson and Deputy Ramirez promptly followed.

-"Do you want to send a report to Earth?" Lidecker, near communications, asked.

-"We're on the dark side. Transmissions would not be possible in a few more hours. Besides, by the time they receive the report, the situation would be contained, no need to rush. We'll sent a complete report once the creature had been killed and we had decide what to do with that derelict ship"

- o –

Unlike the main levels, the basement and sub-basement were not prefabricated parts and brought down by the colony ships and deposited on thick concrete pillars. These levels were excavated about ten meters below ground in the live rock in which the complex was based, so its appearance was not that of an industrial zone but rather resembled a mine. Doesn't matter how many lights they installed, it was dark grey everywhere.

The elevator's door opened in the sub-basement level, Marshal Topher Wilson, technician Mary Coles, Deputy Ramírez and terraformer Simon Breckenridge stepped out. Mary and Breckenridge had motion trackers while the colonial marshals had their shotguns. They chose the short range, wide dispersion shots weapons because they were the best way to kill the fast and elusive creature in close quarters, and causing minimum damage to the infrastructure.

Marshal Wilson was using the buddy system from his days in the Marine 70 program, a total re organization of the Colonial marines after the Tientsin campaign designed for mobility and efficiency. The point man sweeps the area with the tracker whilst his buddy watches the unscanned area.

-"Any sign of it?" Wilson asked.

-"Not yet" Mary checked the device's screen. "These things had limited range and the basement is huge. Be patient, we'll kill it; Breck, how's your side?"

-"Nothing" he said.

Simon "Breck" Breckenridge was tall, almost imposing comparing with Mary; he was a part pest control technician when not in the terraforming bay regulating the greenhouse soil's pH. He was the one who gave Dr. Kent the nahcolite solution container for the creature.

-"Check those pipes" Wilson said "Spread, we need to cover more terrain, but don't go too far."

There was no standard procedure for a Bug hunt, the Marines or Marshals did usually adapt to the circumstances and the type of prey. Active hunting or destruction of nests and breeding zones were priority. After they'll deal with the creature they need to destroy the remaining eggs in that derelict ship Anne and Russ Jorden discovered before anyone else got infected.

Breckenridge and Ramirez checked the corridor at the right, while he and Mary explored the left one. Walking on the tunnel, Breck saw something hanging from a pipe, in the flashlight beam it was translucent, like a piece of plastic moving with the wind of the tunnel. He approached; the thing dripped a crystalline liquid, almost like some animal's saliva.

He used an electric baton to pick up the thing from the pipe; it no longer looked like a piece of plastic. It was about 50 cm long with the shape and texture of the creature they were looking for.

-"Hey, something's here" he called.

-"What is it?" Mary asked back.

-"I Dunno, it's some kind of shredded skin, like a snake"

- o –

Alone, the creature was alone; it was alone in that dark, cold and strange place. The creature's kind was gregarious, they need the company of other members of their species to thrive, their collective mind demanded, sharing thoughts and experiences, learning; As soon as it came out of the cocoon it called for others but there was no response. It was alone and it was painful. It couldn't detect the presence of subtle pheromones indicating a nest neither. Inside its primitive simple mind, there was only one course of action. It needed to reproduce.

Fortunately for them, the creature didn't reproduce like most of the animals did, it didn't need a sexual partner or the complexity of mating rituals; it just needs bio-matter and a host and a warm place. The alien use its new abilities as improved hearing capable of detecting multiple targets' direction and range. Smell detected pheromone traces left by an organism even if hours had passed.

Its claws and feet made the creature able to climb and crawl on every surface and its long segmented tail was armed with a barbed tip capable of sting and pierce metal, inside its fanged mouth, the alien possessed a secondary, protruding jaw with silvery, metal teeth. A hard, silicon polysaccharide exoskeleton protected the creature from damage by almost every kinetic weapon with the sole exception of armor piercing rounds. It was a perfect killing machine.

-"I Dunno, it's some kind of shredded skin, like a snake" a voice reached its resonance chamber.

The creature moved slowly towards the source of the noise. It detected more prey in the area, four in all.

-"Stay alert Breck" said another voice.

-"I think is somewhere here" he said, entering the corridor, outside the range of the flashlight.

-"Wait for the Marshal" Ramírez told him, but Breck was out of sight.

Beep, beep, beep. The tracker's shown one green dot ahead: Breckenridge, when Ramirez looked at it, the screen flickered and the dot became two, then the additional contact disappeared. He hit the device but nothing happened, then he thought the battery was low and checked it, but it was eighty percent.

-"Breck, had something on the tracker. Breck? Breck?" the Deputy called, still checking the screen.

No response, He pointed his flashlight ahead and walked there. Marshal Wilson and Coles were inside the other corridor; he can still hear them among the pumps and machinery.

-"Did you notice we hadn't heard any rat?" Mary said.

-"That's good." The Marshal responded

-"That's odd, those damn pests are almost impossible to eradicate. It isn't normal there are none squealing around."

Deputy Ramírez thought about it, it was true. I hadn't heard any animal or other noise down there. He had never came this level but in the bar, Mary Coles complained almost daily that she hadn't been able to locate and eradicate the colony of rats and that their shrieks rumbled throughout the sub-basement.

He heard the tracker beeping again and a contact shown somewhere to his left followed by the sound of something metallic falling. He peered through a tangle of pipes and saw a single rat. It was a large specimen, grey and with large incisors; its marble-like black eyes looking at him.

-"Oh, looks like Coles was wrong, there's something for you here" He said as he pulled out the riot electric baton, sparkling from its double tip.

The rat hissed furiously and then fled, squeezing its body between two pipes and disappeared.

-"Ha, That's right you little shit, run." He said victoriously.

He got up, but when he turned around he saw a form behind him. It hadn't made the slightest noise as it fell from the ceiling. It was large, a dark gray color that allowed it to blend with the surrounding machinery, it had long arms that ended in double fused clawed fingers, an elongated smooth head with an eyeless face, lipless mouth with silver teeth that seemed to be smiling at him, and a long segmented tail ending in a stinger like that of a scorpion.

Before he could do something or even let out a scream, the thing pounced at him at lightning speed and caught him with those long viscous fingers, it lifted his head close to that mouth full of sharp teeth and the last thing he saw was fangs shooting out from inside that mouth to his face. The motion tracker fell to the ground, its screen showed two dots moving away fast.

-"Ramirez, I lost the trail" Breckenridge walked back through the corridor, but the Deputy wasn't there. He saw the flashlight rolling lightly on the ground, its beam illuminated the motion detector and an electric baton covered with the same crystalline substance that I had seen in the pipe.

-"Ramírez? Marshal? Marshal! Come here, it's Ramírez" he called.

-"What happened?" Wilson asked, he and Mary arrived shortly.

-"I lost him, I was checking a trail then he disappeared, I found this" he explained, pointing at the tracker, baton and flashlight.

-"What's this?" said Mary, touching the jelly like substance, it itched. She cleaned it up on his pants. "It itches, like a mild acid"

-"Could've been the creature?" Breck asked.

-"If it was, where's Ramírez? A snake-sized creature can't drag a man" Wilson responded. "Ramírez! Officer? Come in." he called on his headset radio, nothing, just static.

- o –

Inside the maintenance corridor 7-B, the creature used its secreted resin to glue the Deputy's body to a wall. That mildly acidic resin also acted as a digestive enzyme designed to decompose bio-matter into its protein and aminoacid components at the same time it reorganized them into alien's genetic material, growing an egg out of the victim's body. With the process in motion, the creature set out for a future host.

A/N: Hello again, here it is, a chapter seen from the alien's POV. I had written the alien's perspective before in Alien Isolation: Monster Maze, it was difficult to get into the creature's mind and I want to avoid any comparison with human mind, for me it's more of an animal and thus, it's thoughts are basic instinct. It's stated the creatures are gregarious, part of a compound mind so I guessed besides hunger or fear, the creature must've feel alone. They need each other and when they can't find another alien the next step is reproduce, making an egg through eggmorphing. At this point, the creature is not a Queen yet.

If you had read Monster Maze, you did know my idea of a Queen is not only for reproductive role but also as command and control when population reached a critical point, usually ten individuals. That is because aliens share memories and thoughts through the gel filled pores on their heads, and as population grows, sharing minds turned tricky. Its gigantic crest is some kind of antenna designed to transmit and receive electromagnetic waves from every creature in existence (I don't like the term telepathy).

Anyway, the scene of the alien abducting Deputy Ramirez is similar to Brett's death, with a rat instead of Jones, but rats are the only animals there on the sub-basement so I can't insert a pet like a ferret, as Deevs suggested. Stay tuned for more soon, and don't forget to comment.